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Last week, CVS Health did the right thing and cut ties with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. This announcement came in the wake of a series of New York Times articles revealing the Chamber’s role in a global lobbying effort to combat anti-smoking policies. CVS Health’s decision to leave the Chamber follows its 2014 decision to end sales of all tobacco products. CVS senior vice president David Palombi has explained, “CVS Health’s purpose is to help people on their path to better health, and we fundamentally believe tobacco use is in direct conflict with this purpose.”

The NYT series also highlighted a common misconception, that the Chamber of Commerce is part of the U.S. government. This confusion is not unfounded: U.S. government officials often affiliate with international divisions of the Chamber. For example, in Estonia, the U.S. ambassador serves as the honorary president of AmCham Estonia.

The President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, responded to the NYT article and CVS Health’s departure in a NYT Letter to the Editor. Donohue justified the Chamber’s lobbying against anti-smoking laws by hiding behind a veil of intellectual property protectionism. This veneer is easily seen through. It is clear that the Chamber is protecting the interests of prominent tobacco industry representatives with which it is affiliated, such as Philip Morris, without regard to the public health implications of its actions. As pointed out by a follow-up NYT article, such a view of its stance would not explain why the lobbying association has taken stands against policies that have nothing to do with intellectual property: “The chamber has not said why it has opposed public health steps like restricting smoking in public places, which it called an ‘extreme’ measure when it was proposed in Moldova.”

In the past few years, the Chamber has lost a number of significant members due to its unpopular positions on important policy issues. In 2009, Apple left the Chamber over the Chamber’s opposition to climate-change initiatives that the Environmental Protection Agency set forth to lower greenhouse gas emissions. In 2011, Yahoo! left due to the Chamber’s support of the PROTECT IP act, a law that would have restricted internet freedom. In 2013, the environmentally sustainable construction company Skanska, left the Chamber due to their support of a chemical-industry led initiative to ban future government buildings from being ‘Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design’ (LEED) certified, which is contrary to Skanska’s business practices .

When asked about its departure, CVS Health’s Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Troyen Brennan, explained, “it was very difficult for us to remain as a member once the revelations about the Chamber’s overseas [opposition to anti-smoking policies] advocacy became clear.”

Hopefully CVS Health’s move will provide an example for other health care companies and inspire them to question their memberships in the Chamber as well.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as the self-described “world’s largest business organization,” has a major influence in public policy both here at home and internationally. A report released today by Tobacco Free Kids, Public Citizen’s U.S. Chamber Watch, Corporate Accountability International and several other organizations shows unequivocally how Big Tobacco has mobilized the Chamber’s economic and political power to bully governments into blocking, delaying, and weakening life-saving health policies worldwide.

The Chamber purports to represent the interests of three million businesses of all sizes, including the smallest mom and pop businesses. However, a February 2014 report by Public Citizen’s U.S. Chamber Watch project, “The Gilded Chamber,” found that more than half of the money the Chamber raised in 2012 came from just 64 anonymous corporate donors. With corporate cash flooding its coffers, it is unsurprising that the policy positions the Chamber takes are skewed towards helping those corporate interests, and away from protecting the Main Street businesses it uses as a shield for its actions.

The Chamber wields its economic clout aggressively, spending more on lobbying than any other interest group in the country. In addition, it has 116 American Chamber of Commerce affiliates, or AmChams, around the globe in 103 countries, and spends liberally there as well. The magnitude of the Chamber’s spending as well as their active engagement internationally means their positions on public policies, including health issues, are often perceived as carrying the weight of the U.S. business community. As such, disregarding their positions can carry an implied economic threat and countries hesitate to do so.

Our report and a two-part New York Times investigation shows that, while the Chamber throws its weight around in many Global South countries to protect its corporate members’ interests, Big Tobacco has also pushed it to adopt particularly aggressive and radical positions in order to undermine the cascade of public health laws being passed as a result of the success of the global tobacco treaty. In an initial reaction to this reporting, CVS Health has recently resigned from the Chamber, and a group of United States Senators released a public statement critical of them as well as sent letters to the member companies of the U.S. Chamber’s Board of Directors asking about their positions on the Chamber’s efforts to fight tobacco control measures.

For tobacco control advocates familiar with this deadly industry’s tactics, the Chamber’s work in this space comes as no surprise. Internal documents tell us that as the tobacco industry lost its public credibility, it began to use third parties to advocate on its behalf.

Case studies in our report, from Africa to Latin America, make it clear that Big Tobacco is doggedly pursuing this strategy with the U.S. Chamber and its affiliates in Global South countries. In countries the tobacco industry has targeted around the world, the Chamber is delivering threatening letters that cast doubt on the science behind tobacco control, exaggerating the economic impacts of proven measures like tobacco taxation and crying wolf about explosions in illicit trade. In pursuing these actions, the Chamber and its AmCham affiliates are exporting well-documented tobacco industry tactics to block health laws around the globe. And as the New York Times points out in its investigation, (and then advocates that countries resist in their recent editorial: Tarred by Tobacco), these tactics are in some cases drafted by Big Tobacco executives themselves.

Clearly, there is a deep conflict of interest between the Chamber’s aggressiveness on tobacco and the interests of its health-related members. So why is the Chamber so brazenly pursuing the interests of Big Tobacco? The answer lies in the Chamber’s deep financial and political ties with the tobacco industry. A top executive at the tobacco giant Altria Group serves on the chamber’s board as does a representative of the former parent company of Philip Morris International (PMI.) The largest transnational tobacco corporations in the world such as PMI, British American Tobacco (BAT), Japan Tobacco International (JTI) and Imperial Tobacco hold memberships in more than 55 AmCham chapters.

Countries around the world should know that U.S. Chamber does not represent the American people or the U.S. government, nor is it representative of the broad swath of U.S. businesses. They should also continue implementing the global tobacco treaty’s life-saving measures, particularly Article 5.3, which is geared towards protecting public health measures against just these kinds of industry tactics. And finally, the private sector should think twice about the reputational risk posed by remaining a part of a trade group that puts the profits of the world’s deadliest industry before even its own members’ interests.

Statement of Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen, Host of U.S. Chamber Watch

Today, Tom Donohue, the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the lobby group for Big Business, gives his annual State of American Business address.

Donohue has a lot to celebrate. Corporate profits have risen for 12 straight quarters. Corporate profits as a share of the economy are at a record high. Wages as a share of the economy are at a record low. Effective corporate taxes are at a record low.

Although corporate America is living larger than ever before, the odds are overwhelming that Donohue in his address will complain about the imaginary shackles on Big Business and demand still more subsidies and deals that aid the world’s biggest companies but hurt America and Americans. The odds are overwhelming because Donohue pretty much gives the same speech every year.

Here’s some of what we can expect:

– A plea for more NAFTA-style trade agreements and revival of the Nixon-era Fast Track authority to railroad them through Congress. No doubt these deals increase business power. But over the past two decades, these trade agreements have failed (PDF) to meet their business sector and political backers’ glowing promises, and instead have resulted in unprecedented and unsustainable trade deficits, the net loss of nearly 5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs, more than 57,000 factories with millions of higher-wage service sector jobs offshored, flat median wages despite significant productivity gains and the worst U.S. income inequality in the past century.

Now Donohue will likely call for a NAFTA-style deal with Asian and Latin American countries, and for Fast Track trade authority to strip Congress of its constitutional authority over trade. Fast Track empowers trade officials, directed by 600 official corporate trade advisors, to diplomatically legislate – using “trade” agreements to put into place policies favored by the Chamber that failed in the sunshine of public debate. This includes imposing anti-consumer policies that have nothing do with traditional conceptions of “trade,” covering matters such as patent and copyright rules, regulatory standards, food safety rules, special powers for corporations to sue governments before private tribunals over alleged lost profits, Internet governance and much more.

– Complaints about the alleged enormous regulatory burden on business and the need for legislation to handcuff consumer, health, safety, environmental, worker protection and other agencies from issuing new rules, as well as to roll back Dodd-Frank financial reforms. Somehow, Donohue will neglect to mention the costs of regulatory failures: The financial crisis and Great Recession (cost measured in the trillions); the BP oil disaster; Upper Big Branch and Sago coal mine disasters, among others; salmonella outbreaks involving everything from cantaloupe to peanut butter; widespread preventable workplace-related death and disease (PDF); life-threatening air pollution; and much more.

Donohue will almost certainly whine about the unfairness of regulation and how it injures the economy. He almost certainly will fail to say that the benefits massively outpace costs, even when measured by corporate-friendly cost-benefit accounting techniques. The Office of Management and Budget (part of the White House) finds that (PDF):

“The estimated annual benefits of major Federal regulations reviewed by OMB from October 1, 2003, to September 30, 2013, for which agencies estimated and monetized both benefits and costs, are in the aggregate between $217 billion and $863 billion, while the estimated annual costs are in the aggregate between $57 billion and $84 billion. These ranges are reported in 2001 dollars and reflect uncertainty in the benefits and costs of each rule at the time that it was evaluated.”

In other words, benefits of the rules issued over the past decade – including during the Bush administration – are at least three times greater than costs, and as much as 13 times higher.

– A demand to immunize companies from lawsuits that aim to hold them accountable for wrongdoing. Donohue will harp on this bugaboo even though consumers’ right to sue wrongdoers has been eviscerated by a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that enable companies to use fine-print terms in contracts to force disputes to be resolved by kangaroo arbitration panels rather than real courts, and to block consumers from banding together over shared wrongs. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has found that such fine-print provisions are pervasive in the financial sector, and they are manifold throughout the economy.

Even more ironic, perhaps, is the Chamber claim about the need for “legal reform” to protect corporate wrongdoers even as the Chamber engages in excessive litigation and even as it aids the giant foreign corporation BP in its effort to persuade courts to overturn a legal settlement into which it entered voluntarily. Here the Chamber is actually siding with an admitted felon foreign multinational against the interests of the small businesses injured by the BP oil disaster.

– A call for greater development of dirty energy. Oil prices have plummeted, and U.S. production of oil and gas is skyrocketing. Meanwhile, evidence abounds that the world is rushing face-first toward climate catastrophe (PDF). Instead of calling for massive public investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy – investments that would spur creation of new jobs, build up a fledgling U.S. industry and, eventually, yield enormous economy-wide savings on energy – Donohue is almost certain to insist on the need to further subsidize and immunize the dirty energy industries.

He is almost certain not to mention the grave threat that climate change poses to business over time, a stunning oversight for the man who fancies himself the spokesperson for the corporate class, and who should be looking out for its long-term interests.
There are a few other things Donohue is not likely to mention.

For example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce purports to represent all business. Its funding base, however, is a handful of giant corporations. More than half of its contributions came from just 64 donors.

And, the Chamber has disproportionate influence not because of the merits of its positions, but its deployment of money in politics. It was the largest dark money organization in the 2014 elections. The Chamber invested very heavily and successfully in the 2014 elections, to defeat populist-minded tea party candidates somewhat independent of Big Business control in primaries, and to elect corporate-minded candidates in the general election. And, the Chamber is the largest lobbying organization in Washington, by far.

In his annual address, Tom Donohue routinely conflates the state of American business with the state of the American economy. Well, the state of giant corporations is flush. But regular people continue to suffer – from precisely the policies that the Chamber urges.

Earlier this month, the Department of Labor’s Advisory Committee on Construction Safety and Health (ACCSH) heard a presentation from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) on employers’ continuing obligation to make and maintain accurate records of workplace injuries and illnesses.

OSHA has said that “the duty to record an injury or illness … does not expire just because the employer fails to create the necessary records when first required to do so.” In other words, being fined by OSHA for violating a record-keeping rule does not absolve the employer of its ongoing responsibility to keep up-to-date records. Employers that continue to fail to keep the legally required records continue to be subject to fines.

This should be a matter of common sense – arguing the contrary is like saying a driver pulled over on the highway and fined for speeding should no longer be required to obey speed limits.

But this commonsense obligation to keep accurate records (and obey the law) apparently is not enough for some employers. That’s why OSHA is planning to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking by the end of the year seeking to amend its record-keeping regulations to clarify that the duty to make and maintain accurate records of work-related injuries and illnesses is an ongoing obligation.

The rulemaking is necessary because in 2012 a panel at the D.C. Circuit court disagreed with OSHA’s 40 years of practice and rejected the agency’s argument that a failure to record an injury or illness is a continuing violation.

Corporate America would like to continue the current limited rule interpretation and it would not be far-fetched to guess that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agrees with the D.C. Circuit decision.

During the recent ACCSH meeting, representatives from the Chamber of Commerce, the law offices of Jackson and Lewis P.C. and the law offices of McDermott Will & Emery could be seen expressing their disdain for OSHA’s proposal to modernize the record-keeping rule. And, earlier this year, OSHA was met with strong Big Business opposition on a different proposed record-keeping rule change. So there is no reason to think that this new proposal will be treated any differently by the Chamber once it is entered into the Federal Register.

Our friends at Think Progress posted agem on their blogthis week describing Corporate America’s griping at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event about its supposedly waning “free speech” privileges. Apparently, the huge momentum behind requiring disclosure has dark money political spenders quaking in their boots!

At one point during the event, Paul Atkins, the CEO of Patomak Global Partners LLC, actually compared shareholders who want companies to be more transparent to neo-Nazis. Now that you’ve finished choking on your coffee, consider his actual words:

“When I was a staffer at the SEC [U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission] back in the early 90s, a group of Neo-Nazis came up with a proposal for AT&T… it had to go into the proxy statement because of the way the rules were. That’s pretty bad but carry it forward now — we have issues here like disclosure of political spending or lobbying or general political spending and these disclosures are not material at all.”

Sure Paul, advocating for transparency is just the natural outgrowth of neo-Nazism. And neo-Nazism is just “pretty bad” anyway. (Yeah, right!)

Google has revolutionized the world of information sharing, but it can’t seem to follow up on a basic commitment it made to its shareholders five months ago.

At Google’s May 2014 shareholder meeting, we asked Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt how he would respond to shareholder calls for greater political spending transparency. Despite its “Don’t Be Evil” motto, Google funds major dark money groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and ranks among the worst of the major tech companies in political spending transparency. The amount of information it collects about users while withholding information about its own practices creates a dangerous imbalance of power.

“Let me summarize your request,” Schmidt said at the May meeting. “We need to be more transparent. And we’ve heard that from a number of other shareholders … Let us come back with some ideas.”

Google hadn’t responded to any of our more than half a dozen phone calls and emails, so last week we attended a talk by Eric Schmidt to ask him once again.

“At your shareholder meeting this year, you said that you would respond to shareholder calls for more transparency in political spending,” I said to Schmidt during the Q&A.

“Yes,” he responded.

“Are you still working on that?” I said.

“I don’t know the status of that, but we certainly promised. So maybe we can follow up on that one.”

Once again, we’re reaching out to Google but getting no follow-up. Google can clearly do better. It certainly promised.

The need for the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act remains alive and well. Companies and executives are still getting caught red-handed. The U.S. Chamber still wants the highly effective law weakened.

Since the landmark guilty plea and settlement in the Alcoa Worldwide Alumina (Alcoa) case in January, companies have paid another $196 million in penalties for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). In March, Marubeni Corporation pleaded guilty to bribing an Indonesian member of Parliament, among other foreign officials. In April, Hewlett-Packard subsidiaries in Russia, Poland and Mexico accepted responsibility for bribing former executives of state-owned companies and police department officials and for maintaining a multi-million dollar slush fund for various other corrupt payments in those countries. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has indicted several other individuals since the Alcoa case as well, including Wall Street broker-dealers and a former vice president of Bechtel Corporation.

Despite these recent successes in curbing egregiously corrupt behavior under the FCPA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants to weaken the law. A few days before Halloween 2010, the Chamber released a report that dressed up the FCPA as a boogeyman that scared away business with its “increasingly aggressive” interpretation by enforcement agencies. The Chamber report demanded five amendments to the FCPA — nominally to provide guidance for businesses in complying with the law — that actually were designed to hamstring enforcement. Undeterred by the subsequent release of a 130-page guidance document by DOJ and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rejecting the Chamber’s demands, the Chamber still ranks FCPA “reform” among their lobbying priorities for 2014.

One of the Chamber’s proposed amendments calls for limited liability for corporations whose subsidiaries violate provisions of the FCPA — in other words, rewarding ignorance (or feigned ignorance) by parent companies. But loosening the rules for parent companies creates an incentive for more of the same corrupt acts described in the Hewlett-Packard subsidiaries’ admissions of misconduct just this April.

Public Citizen’s November 2013 report, “License to Bribe,” details all five amendments sought by the Chamber, and provides common-sense rebuttals to each proposal. The bottom line: corruption is demonstrably harmful to both business and democracy.

The FCPA is America’s most salient global anti-corruption tool. Since it was first enacted in 1977, countries and international organizations around the world have followed America’s lead and enacted similar global anti-corruption rules. Now that business is more global than ever before, it is no time to weaken the FCPA.

Jess Unger is a legal fellow with Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a corporate victory of “startling breadth,” and in Harris v. Quinn, are only the latest in a trend at the U.S. Supreme Court over the past six years.

A new report by the Constitutional Accountability Center titled “The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Continues its Winning Ways” shows that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has gotten its way in an astonishing 80 percent of the cases it has argued over the past three terms, including 69 percent this term and 70 percent since President George W. Bush appointed Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the court.

The Chamber’s 80 percent success rate over the past three terms comprises 32 wins and just eight losses. That’s a streak like the one enjoyed by Lebron James’ 2013 Miami Heat, which had one of the best seasons in NBA history last year, winning 80 percent of its games on its way to a second straight championship.

The Chamber’s winning streak since Alito succeeded Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 2006, with a 70 percent win rate over that time period, is a distinct phenomenon: the Chamber won only 43 percent of the time in the Burger court (15 of 35 from 1981-1986) and 56 percent in the Rehnquist court (45 of 80 from 1994-2005).

This suggests that the Chamber’s recent record owes more to the current composition of the court than the Chamber’s lawyering, so it’s important not to overstate the Chamber’s influence on what the court actually decides.

The report also notes how aggressively the Chamber works to overturn long held precedents considered unfriendly to business interests. While the Chamber and its Institute for Legal Reform rail against “activist attorneys general” and lawyers “seeking a big, fat payday” to demonize judicial arguments that would rein in corporate abuses, they routinely recommend that the Supreme Court overrule longstanding and settled precedent.

“For instance,” the report reads, “the Chamber argued that the Court should second-guess two centuries of executive practice in [National Labor Relations Board v.] Canning, overrule a quarter-century’s worth of precedent in Halliburton [Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc.], limit the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases in [Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA], and toss out important interstate air pollution rules in EPA v. EME Homer.”

We are now seeing the culmination of decades of Chamber work in the courts, dating back to the infamous 1971 memorandum by corporate tobacco attorney Lewis Powell, that said, in part,

“Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations. … The role of the National Chamber of Commerce is therefore vital. … Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”

The same year Powell wrote his memorandum, President Richard Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court, where he wrote the opinion that the Roberts court used to reach its corrosive Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission decision, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited sums to influence political campaigns. The Chamber’s decades of lobbying, campaign spending and aggression in the courts are paying off at accelerating rates.

Powell wrote his memorandum in response to a period of success for progressive issues in the courts, college campuses and other arenas of influence. His paper concluded,

“The first step should be a thorough study. But this would be an exercise in futility unless the Board of Directors of the Chamber accepts the fundamental premise of this paper, namely, that business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late.”

It seems clear that the tables have turned. The Chamber’s resounding successes in the Supreme Court over the past six years spell trouble for the equality and sustainability of our country. It is long past time for the left, both institutional and non-institutional, to redouble its efforts. The hour is late.

Sam Jewler is the communications and research officer for Public Citizen’s Chamber Watch program.

A new survey of small businesses, “Small Business Owners’ Views on Climate & Energy Policy Reform,” indicates the U.S. Chamber is even more isolated in its regressive anti-science position. Especially considering the Chamber’s frequent attempts to claim small businesses as a part of its constituency, the clear call by small business owners to address climate change, evidenced in this report, is remarkable.

Among the major findings:

– 87 percent of business owners named consequences of climate change as potentially harmful to their businesses;
– 64 percent of businesses believe government regulation is needed to reduce carbon emissions from power plants; and
– 57 percent of businesses said that the biggest carbon emitters should make the biggest reductions in carbon emissions and bear most of the costs of reduction efforts.

The findings came from a scientific, national phone survey of 555 small business owners (2 to 99 employees). Significantly, more respondents identified as Republican or independent-leaning Republican (43 percent total) than as being or leaning toward any other group. The report was produced by the American Sustainable Business Council.

What’s often missed amid the Chamber’s commotion about regulatory and tax “burdens” is the reason those measures exist in the first place: the benefits both to those paying their share and to society at large. A plurality (40 percent) of business owners said they would rather accept a 10 percent increase in energy costs than face the consequences of climate change. Only a quarter said they’d rather suffer the consequences of climate change.

Small businesses are widely recognized as the backbone of the economy, and with nearly nine out of 10 saying they worry that climate change could harm their business, it’s clear that the EPA’s action (and more) is needed. The top climate change concerns shared by small business owners included higher energy costs (53 percent), power outages due to stress on the power grid (48 percent), severe storms (41 percent), higher health care costs (37 percent) and higher food costs (35 percent). Other concerns included record-breaking hot and cold spells, a reduced fresh water supply, extreme drought, coastal flooding and more.

The verdict is in. Owners of businesses all shapes and sizes recognize the dangers of climate change and are willing – even eager – to contribute to efforts to protect the planet. Without a stable climate, there can be no stable economy. When the U.S. Chamber says otherwise, it’s speaking for a select few big-money companies that profit handsomely from the status quo. As this report shows, if the U.S. Chamber represents small businesses, it’s not doing it right.

Sam Jewler is the communications and research officer for Public Citizen’s Chamber Watch program.

A week before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its new greenhouse gas emission rule for existing power plants, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a report attempting to pre-empt it, relying on a number of assumptions that turned out to be inaccurate – then interpreting its findings with strong doses of hyperbole.

We rounded up the best responses to the Chamber as it tried to block progress in this historic moment for taking action on climate change.

1. Even before it came out that the Chamber overestimated how ambitious the EPA rules would be, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman noted that the Chamber report actually proved that the cost of action is small.

“So the Chamber is telling us that we can achieve major reductions in greenhouse gases at a cost of 0.2 percent of GDP,” he wrote in a blog post. “That’s cheap!”

“You might ask why the Chamber of Commerce is so fiercely opposed to action against global warming, if the cost of action is so small,” he wrote in an op-ed the next day. “The answer, of course, is that the chamber is serving special interests, notably the coal industry — what’s good for America isn’t good for the Koch brothers, and vice versa — and also catering to the ever more powerful anti-science sentiments of the Republican Party.”

Absurdities litter the Chamber’s report, which Chait writes is “generated as attack-ad fodder.” The Chamber predicted yearly increase in energy demand through 2030 will be double what it’s been since 2000. (The increase in demand has held steady at 0.7 percent per year since 2000; the Chamber predicts 1.4 percent per year, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts 0.9 percent through 2040). It assumed the EPA would call for a 42 percent reduction by 2030, though the administration has suggested a range of less ambitious targets over the last few years (and ended up this week calling for a 30 percent reduction by 2030). It predicts costs of energy 15 years out, not taking into account how technologies adapt and develop to meet requirements like these. And, Chait writes, “the study’s bad faith is made abundantly clear in its conclusion,” in which the Chamber pretends that the U.S. would be alone in reducing its emissions, ignoring the geopolitical reality that no other major country will act until we do. (Indeed, the day after the EPA proposal came out China began to make noises about following suit.)

3. The EPA, too, gave an unusually strong rebuttal to the Chamber as soon as the Chamber’s report came out, using descriptors like “unfounded” and “irresponsible speculation,” and saying, “the Chamber is using the same tired play from the same special interest playbook that is engineered to continue polluting and stall progress.”

The EPA’s blog post details two major areas in which the Chamber overestimates the costs of a proposal it hadn’t yet seen. One is that it assumed states would be required to build new natural gas power plants with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, and made that three-fourths of its cost estimate – but the EPA has indicated frequently that CCS would not be considered for existing power plants. The piece also noted that the Chamber made no mention of the huge costs of climate change that the EPA proposal attempts to avert – in 2012, for example, the U.S. had its second costliest year of natural disasters ever.

4. In “Chamber of Commerce Blasts EPA Rule That Doesn’t Exist,” ThinkProgress noted another benefit conveniently ignored by the Chamber (despite the ostentatious banners that drape its building): jobs.
The Chamber predicts a loss of 224,000 jobs by2030 due to the rule – which is about how many jobs the U.S. adds every couple months. Also, as the article notes: “The Chamber fails to account for jobs that would be created building wind turbines, solar panels, and other sources of renewable power,” said David Hawkins, NRDC’s director of climate programs. The Chamber also left out “the jobs to be created making our homes and businesses more efficient; and the jobs of cleaning up our dirty power plants.”

5. Given how thoroughly the Chamber has been delegitimized on this issue, it may not be entirely surprising that a number of major companies are distancing themselves from the Chamber’s opinion on it. Josh Israel of ThinkProgress reported that companies including Intel, UPS, Verizon, Coca-Cola, 3M, Lockheed Martin, MGM Resorts and Prudential ranged from supporting the EPA’s plan to saying they had no position on it or that the Chamber did not speak for them.

The article noted that a number of major utilities have said much more forward-thinking things about clean energy than the Chamber has (Ben Adler at Grist reported the same). It quoted me saying, “It’s another case of the Chamber not doing what’s best for the economy or the American people and not representing the full range of businesses in the economy.”

While the Chamber has been roundly criticized for its falsehoods and fear-mongering, the criticism alone may not be enough to keep it from moving the final EPA rule closer toward the coal industry’s goals. As Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post wrote, Republican lawmakers are using the Chamber’s hyperbolic findings despite their widespread debunking – he gives their use of the talking points four out of four Pinocchios. And the Chamber is following up, planning an ad buy in six to eight states, putting its misleading report on repeat. Other conservative groups will be mobilizing members to call their politicians about the issue, using “a bunch of doom-and-gloom price-hike figures,” as our Tyson Slocum says.

With the Chamber representing Big Coal and seeing truth as no obstacle, those of us who want a livable planet for current and future generations have our work cut out for us.

Sam Jewler is the communications officer for Public Citizen’s Chamber Watch program.